While commentators and politicians argue about health care and a
band-aid crime bill, children are shooting each other and, quite
often, their parents.

NATURAL BORN KILLERS

A Illusion review by Joan Ellis.

"Natural Born Killers" is Oliver Stone's harrowing scream
that a sick America is celebrating its own decay. The only way
he can reach us, it seems, is to force the blood down our
throats. While commentators and politicians argue about health
care and a band-aid crime bill, children are shooting each other
and, quite often, their parents. Nicole Simpson, by whosever
hand, was slit through to her spinal column outside her own
condominium; the Menendezes were riddled by bullets from the guns
of their own sons; and John Wayne Bobbitt lost his penis in his
own bed.

Stone is incensed that the dying and desperate TV networks,
responding to a ravenous public appetite for gossip, flog their
commentators for ratings in the competition for crumbs in the
race for the lurid gossip scoop.

The whole cultural slop bucket overflowed on the day most
of America watched the Los Angeles Police Department escort, ever
so politely, the White Bronco that carried a suspect in a brutal
slaying. Fearful that Simpson might kill himself if they stopped
his car, they escorted him safely to the destination of his
choice. Oliver Stone is enraged by a culture that has turned
police and media into handmaidens to celebrities. His movie is
an explosive protest in violent imagery.

Part One of this bloodbath chronicles the wanton killing of
52 people by Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette
Lewis) as they honeymoon their way across New Mexico. Without so
much as a remark as to why they kill--"I didn't like his eyes"
would do--they murder anyone who happens to be around when they
stop for coffee or gas. Stone keeps his killers simple. With
pokers, knives, guns and without reason, they kill anyone they
choose, until finally they are cornered, caught and imprisoned,
at which point most of the audience would love to pack up and go
home; but Stone has just begun.

His second wind is a frightening mockery of media
glorification of the lovers' crimes as seen through grotesque
talk-show host Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), whose insatiable
egotistic needs mirror those of his real-life counterparts. The
impossible happens when the movie turns even bloodier in a
prolonged prison riot that portrays warden, cops and inmates as
crazed fools. Stone savages criminals, cops, prisons,
psychologists, the judicial system, and the media, which
encourage carnage in order to sell fear. The whole thing is a
massive self-indulgence of one man's anger.

This movie is not the stuff of satire or parody. It is
Oliver Stone in a colossal rage, drawing his characters in
extreme caricature without a sly or subtle note. Juliette Lewis,
Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones and a cast of hundreds try our
patience by playing their roles in ludicrous overstatement, until
we realize that Stone is using exaggeration to paint a surreal
depiction of mindless brutality and a society that tolerates it.
After that, you may join him in his fury.